Halloween is tomorrow. I am still struggling to decide which costume I WANT my son to wear this year. Lion or monkey. He is too young to really have much say at this point, but I know this will change soon as his gibberish transitions into words, and the words transition into strong opinions.
In reading Time Out NY for kids, I read a powerful and touching article about a father who describes what it’s like to be a parent of a little princess. In About A Boy by Sol Goode, the dad explains that at age two, his son enjoyed the novelty of people’s responses when he donned a frock…but, now at age four, “his desire to wear gowns is a conscious choice bordering on obsession.”
At the end of the article, it states that “It is a universal challenge for parents to manage the separateness of their children: their desire to do things the way they want, to not conform to their parents’ wishes.” Hmmm, I am trying to imagine myself in this dads shoes, and if I too would “bend like a willow”, and allow my son tho freely go through this phase of exploration. I am not sure. As an educator, I was a proponent of exploratory learning – enabling students to uncover the knowledge for themselves without being spoon fed. So, maybe I would go along with it – at least for a while.
I wonder what some other dads would do in this scenario…
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